The Obama Plan

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner presented the Obama plan for dealing with the fiscal cliff. Clearly, that plan is to go over the cliff and then blame the GOP. Obama wants 1.6 trillion dollars in additional taxes from the wealthy over the next decade with no other tax changes. He also wants to do away with all the automatic spending cuts and instead INCREASE spending by about 50 billion dollars as additional stimulus for the economy. Finally, Obama is willing to discuss cutting about 400 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next decade. This is not an offer; it is a joke. These changes will INCREASE the federal deficit over the next decade by over 2.5 trillion dollars. That's right, Obama's plan to deal with the deficit is to increase it in a major way. On top of all this, Obama wants an unlimited increase to the ceiling on the national debt.

Of course, the plan was presented in secret to Congressional leaders so that there are no sound bites showing Obama advocating for this plan. Instead, we had Obama campaigning for months on reducing the deficit in a balanced way. It took just a few days for that promise to go away. Well, the GOP should go away as well. Republican leaders should lay out principles that include keeping the level of spending cuts that were previously agreed to, requiring additional spending cuts in exchange for additional revenue, and a commitment to entitlement reform. Indeed, not only is the fiscal cliff coming, but the debt ceiling is also coming as well, so GOP leverage is great.

Obama is making it easy. Agreeing to what he wants is worse, far worse than just going over the cliff.